To conclude our Pulitzer Prize nominated coverage* of the war that has broken out between Telltale and made up company Videlectrix (made up of moustachioed geniuses, that is), below is our interview with the CEO of Telltale, Dan Connors, in which we grill him about the controversy in a way that makes other games journalists look like the frightened, corporate-bought cowards they truly are. But before that, learn more about the torrid situation with the third and final part of Behind The Bad – the behind-the-scenes exposé of life at Telltale working with Strong Bad.

RPS: Let’s get right down to it. The internet is on fire with the apparent falling out between Telltale and Videlectrix. Could you explain the current situation for our readers?

Dan Connors: Well, it was written expressly in the contract, “Videlectrix shall not participate in the creation of the product, nor should they make contact with Telltale or come within 5 miles of the Telltale offices.” They are also not allowed to send any pictures of themselves to our offices. So we were shocked when not only some floppy disks with game code went missing from our offices, but also a disk that contained all of our PowerPoint slides describing our “sodic” model. Obviously they used those slides as the cornerstone for their brilliant roomasodic model.

DC: Not really. They can’t use the terms -sode, -sodic, epi-, or ep- without paying us a 95% royalty. (Section II, subsection A, part iii, beeyatch.) We support their continued success, as long as they don’t give their games away for free.

RPS: Obviously many are saying this can only end in the courts. Do you foresee a battle for the legal rights to Strong Bad?

DC: At this point, my hope is that this will be resolved with some sort of physical confrontation. Hopefully on Pay Per View.

RPS: You must be wary of getting on the wrong side of the notoriously litigious Videlectrix. Do you worry that Telltale may be the next on the long list of companies destroyed by this developer?

DC: Have you met their lawyer? If it weren’t for the Videlectrix team he would be the dumbest guy on the planet.

RPS: Many have criticised Telltale’s approach to the partnership with Videlectrix from the very beginning. It was made clear that their creative direction for the series of games was not being taken into account. Do you think, in hindsight, that Telltale might have acted with arrogance?

DC: I think the “Behind the Bad” documentary makes it pretty clear that the team at Videlectrix is not familiar with “modern” gaming in any sense of the word. Being dismissive of their opinion is actually the kindest thing we could possibly be doing for them.

RPS: Even after all this, do you still have the gall to finish this interview with a plug for the Strong Bad series?

DC: But of course. Check out Strong Bad’s Cool Game For Attractive People, featuring all of your favourite characters from Homestarrunner.com (and even the lame ones). We even gave those Videlectrix clowns a cameo in the finale.

And with that, we’ll let the matter rest. Telltale have clearly been put in their place. Videlectrix have had their dignity restored. And we’ve been accused of being paid to run these ridiculous interviews. Check out SBCG4AP – it’s the first decent non-free point and click adventure in years.

Hey, actors and directors get to plug their new projects in luvvie interviews all the time; why should games developers be any different? At least in this case John’s helping plug a game that he actually likes.

Jesus I was only making a joke, guys! Talk to your fucking therapist why dontcha! You know I love the blog really. And yes, I realize they have to do this. Lost our sense of humour in the xmas sales did we gang?

Hmm, comments editing has gone and become borkededoo. Its inserting %20 (Internet URL equivalent for space) and other similar web symbol notifiers when you try to edit the comment after submitting. Darn strange.

“Jesus I was only making a joke, guys! Talk to your fucking therapist why dontcha! You know I love the blog really. And yes, I realize they have to do this. Lost our sense of humour in the xmas sales did we gang?”

The only complaint I have about the ads is there’s so much animation and layering on every page that it managed to overheat and crash my laptop all by itself.

I’m amused that the page I’m on right now has not one but two highly animated World of Warcraft ads. Blizzard — thank you very much for advertising on my favorite blog, but everybody on Earth that wants to play WoW, is playing WoW. Crashing my laptop hasn’t broken my resolve, indeed, now that the cooling element on it is well and truly fried (took 30 minutes just to get it back down before 70 C!), that’s one less machine that I could run WoW on.

Though honestly my laptop’s been a piece of crap for years and for home use I’m going to switch back to using a secondary desktop as soon as possible, so this was just a call to action. Hopefully I can still read PDFs and check my email without scorching any conference tables at the college.

I agree with Stromko in that almost all flash adverts have a canny knack of completely totalling my browser, causing within me an intense irrational anger at both the hawker and the site carrying its ads. So I use adblock, which I find to be morally nebulous (which is just a fancy way of saying I feel greedy and selfish for leeching my content) – but if the ads are preventing me from surfing the web, I’m not entirely sure what choice I have. And with google ads moving from their classy understated model into obtrusive, annoying browserfucker monstrosities, I can’t even whitelist their servers in a futile gesture of compromise.

I disable all ads via adblock and don’t feel a bit bad about it. I wasn’t going to click the ad, and odds are that the sites I frequent sell ads through pageviews rather than clickthroughs, so I’m not hurting your business.

Er, A-Scale, if the sites you frequent rely on pageviews, then your switching the adverts off means you are absolutely hurting the business. The ads know how many times they’ve been loaded – not loading them means you lose money for the site. Thanks!

Actually, how many RPS readers use adblock as opposed to plain browser pop-up blocking? I suspect it’s higher than the internet average. Personally, I’d rather adblock and subscribe rather than be distracted by ads. It’s like having the TV on in the corner of the room – many people can ignore it, but for someone like me who rarely watches TV, it’s like having a whining child in the room, advertising detergents.

Same here, I use adblock, but only for resource-heavy ads.
Sadly, that means I block quite a lot of them on rps! And I honestly wouldn’t if my laptop wouldn’t overheat and die from them. I even routinely click ads every now and again, although I’m not always sure if the particular system of advertisement actually takes that into account.